Autumn has always been a marked point on the calendar regarding animation. Once we leave the summer heat behind, animation studios take advantage of the falling leaves to present their most anticipated productions of the year. A season marked by seinen anime, that is, those aimed at a more adult and mature audience. Although animation dubbing in Catalan seems to be starting to return little by little, we will have to resign ourselves to the Catalan subtitles available on Netflix. Apart from this platform, many of the proposals this month will be available on Crunchyroll, the main streaming service dedicated to Japanese animation.

Right-wing newspapers have been repeating a mantra for months, with pieces marking a milestone to be achieved. It is necessary to obtain three-fifths of the seats in Congress between the PP and VOX, they say, to build a majority broad enough to allow for the renewal of bodies such as the Constitutional Court or the board of directors of RTVE without having to reach an agreement with the PSOE. These are unashamed slogans, which involve openly acknowledging the will to impose their policies with a steamroller. Behind these reinforced majorities provided for by law lies the healthy idea of forcing consensus to avoid sectarianism. Maximum cynicism, then, from the media that are now setting this goal for themselves, when they have spent years talking about the fallacy of independent judges and passing off any legitimate criticism as anti-democratic attacks. It becomes obvious that they did not want to defend the separation of powers. The only thing they wanted, quite simply, was to be able to occupy all the levers of power, from the first robe to the last armchair. Editorials that scolded the Constitutional Court for having a (let's call it) progressive majority will now look favorably upon the fact that, in the name of saving Spain, the supposed center-right of the PP corners the PSOE in these negotiations and agrees with the ultra-right Vox on a purge of the high court.

Laia Marull (Barcelona, 1973) is rarely seen on television, the medium that kicked off her career with the series Estació d'enllaç. After having only made sporadic appearances in recent years, she now premieres El castillo, a Movistar Plus+ fiction in which she plays a police officer who, in the mid-90s and early 2000s, investigates the criminal and economic network of human trafficking. It is a raw and exhaustive series, which we discuss during a meeting in Barceloneta, the actress's neighborhood for decades.

Ten years after being found not guilty of the murder of Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman, O.J. Simpson agreed to participate in an unscripted hidden camera television show that was absolutely grotesque. The program was part of the trash TV boom of the early 2000s, where degradation and dehumanization were considered the most effective entertainment formula to capture audiences. The former NFL star would dress up, play pranks, or appear by surprise in different contexts induced by the program itself to prove that Americans still accepted him. The result of Juiced was rather dubious and pathetic, and once the content leaked, no television network wanted to air the program to avoid the controversy and the bad image of validating a murderer.

I read on the front page of El País that “Juan Carlos I renounces the 65 million he gave to Corinna Larsen”. But what strikes me most is that they refer to her as “his ex-partner”. I think about the tortuous path the press has had to travel to finally call things by their name. What the royal household once accepted defining as an “intimate friend” –although I don’t know if, given the nature of the relationship, bringing up guts was a good semantic idea– the more monarchist media persisted in treating her with questionable euphemisms such as “special friend” or “close friend”. It took a few more scandals to break, for him to abdicate, and for him to put a few thousand kilometers of distance between them to finally be able to call her his “mistress” in the press. It is a more accurate term, because it frankly captures the recreational activities they indulged in, but it still evokes a fleeting relationship, of sporadic and clandestine encounters, it was great, I’ll call you later, and then each to their own home. That El País speaks of her in terms of an ex-partner is a whole other kettle of fish and the term helps to understand some dynamics like this peculiar 65 million little Bizum that will remain unpunished. “Keep this for a while, queen,” Juan Carlos might have told her, before putting his hand over his mouth and exclaiming “Oops, sorry!”.

The campaign is looking messy, but I already have my raincoat on so that the mud slides off me, literally and metaphorically. And so, with my hood up, I can still smile when I see that El Mundo titles its Friday front page: “Sánchez will announce the pension increase two days before 29-N”. Explained like this, it seems as if they have dusted off the crystal ball and that the PSOE leader is coming up with populist and desperate measures to save his electoral numbers. In reality, what is happening is that the National Statistics Institute will publish the inflation data on November 27 and it will not be until then that pensions can be updated taking this figure into account, since 2022, the improvement of contributory pensions has been linked to the CPI (calculated between December of the previous year and November of the current fiscal year). Surely there is electoral trickery and these factors have been weighed when deciding the date, but it is the same cunning that El Mundo resorts to when it seeks to deflate the issue and portray Sánchez as a crook. La Razón does something similar: “Díaz will raise the minimum wage above inflation before 29-N”.

3Cat wants to expand its presence on YouTube with a strategy that seeks to adapt to new audiovisual consumption habits, reach audiences that go beyond traditional television, and strengthen the presence of Catalan in the digital environment. The project is structured around three axes: creating content designed specifically for the platform, promoting Catalan creators, and implementing a new offer of channels reorganized by themes. Today, at the Torre Glòries Auditorium, the roadmap was presented by Rosa Romà, president of the Catalan Broadcasting Corporation (CCMA), Cristina Villà, director of innovation, research, and digital strategy, Judith de Argila, director of digital audience development, and Vicky Cazalla, head of strategic media partnerships at YouTube.

Getting an interview with Shakira is not easy at all, and Thursday's episode of La revuelta, on RTVE, was proof of that. According to David Broncano's team, they received confirmation of the meeting with only one day's notice and an appointment at 5 p.m. at Macondo Park, the Madrid complex where the artist holds her concerts. Without time to prepare a set or a conventional setup, always according to La revuelta, the presenter, who decided to show the whole process, grabbed a sandwich, a bottle of water, and a small team to head to the venue.

With the uncertainty of what will happen to La 2Cat if the PP and Vox form a government after the elections, the young Catalan-language channel has presented a slightly expansive schedule, which incorporates new voices and adds a few more hours of live broadcasting, up to eight daily. This was explained this Thursday by the channel's heads, in a presentation event that served to unveil the schedule for the coming months. Among the novelties, the programs Cervells mínims, by Toni Clapés, Catalunya fantàstica, by Albert Pla, Tot això eren camps, by Judit Martín, and Nous guerrers, by Erik Harley.

On Tuesday, on Horizonte, twenty-four hours before the death of Maricarmen Abascal, they excelled in their sensationalism with one of the most delusional comments ever made about this woman. Chapu Apaolaza, columnist and editorialist for Abc, claimed that the social mobilization around the eviction of this Madrid resident was actually a smokescreen created by the Spanish government itself to cover up the Ceuta crisis. According to the journalist, it was a cover-up strategy through a fiction constructed at the publicly owned residence in Lanzarote that Spanish prime ministers use to spend their vacations: “Tienen que sustituirlo por algo más grave. Hacen un casting y eso es lo que deciden en La Mareta. Todo lo que está sucediendo ahora es una operación que se decidió en La Mareta, con un casting para buscar a una mujer que sale con camilla de la casa, con un delegado del gobierno que, con un sindicato de inquilinas 'fake', termina acampado en Sol”. In other words, Maricarmen was an actress used to construct a farce to mobilize the left. No one contradicted the theory. Eduardo Inda confirmed it with histrionics and they claimed it was a system where every circumstance was replaced by a more serious one. They exhibited their concern about what the next action they would come up with would be. Íker Jimenez had a name for this type of operation: “Lo llaman la doctrina del shock”.

My television colleague Mònica Planas was commenting the other day on the cynicism involved in seeing certain television bigwigs scolding politicians for the tone of public conversation, only to immediately stir up the hornet's nest of tension with a stick once the solemn editorial is finished. They criticize the use of insults and hurtful videos on social media, but they play them with delight and amplify their reach. Reading her, I thought about how a journalistic subgenre also tinged with cynicism is being born, which is going to demonstrations looking for the blow against the poor reporter they have assigned there, in order to then stand up as victims. Nacho Abad made a scene the other day on Cuatro because his camera had been broken. A video from the Bad tongues on La 1 in which various Fascist homos insulted a reporter went viral. Even Iker Jiménez has had the stomach to ask for respect for journalistic work –journalism?– after some protesters confronted a reporter.

The video game sector in Catalonia has been demonstrating extraordinary vitality for years, but it lacked a great, unified, and ambitious showcase at the level of its industrial and creative weight. The SAGA Barcelona Game Fest wants to fill this void and is born from the strategic merger of the three reference events in the territory: the IndieDevDay (rebranded as BCN Game Fest and promoted by the ICOA), which provides the professional muscle and the developer community; the SAGA, Gaming Salon (organized by Plataforma per la Llengua), which focuses on linguistic normalization within the sector, and the cultural association RetroBarcelona, which acts as the protector and disseminator of the history and heritage of video games.

Love and sexuality are eternal themes that have occupied and worried people since the beginning of time, but they can also be analyzed from a contemporary perspective and through current events. It is this intersection that Embolicades aims to explore, a new podcast launched by ARA this Friday with Beti Badia and Estela Ortiz to talk about sex-affective issues from the present, building bridges between culture, thought, current affairs, and personal experience.

When mobile phones ring with the strident tone of ES-Alert alarms it is impossible not to hear them, and in these last few days we have heard them often. But when they ring often there is also criticism from citizens who believe they arrive late or, conversely, that they are sent in places where they would not be needed. Now an online game devised by programmer and meteorology enthusiast Xavier Garcia invites you to try it yourself, if you think you would do it better. It is called ES-Alert Simulator and, when you play it, you will put yourself in the shoes of a Civil Protection duty officer in Catalonia during a rain episode.

The actor Bruno Bergonzini, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when he was only 25 years old, has made an appeal on social media to find an adapted apartment that would allow him to live with his illness. As he shared in a post on Instagram, he has been granted aid under the dependency law and currently lives in a residence, but in order not to lose this aid, he needs to find a "minimally adapted" home in the province of Barcelona within the next two months. Bergonzini is known for his roles in productions such as Laberint d'ombres, Al salir de clase and El mar.

The parties try to control the tempos and play them to their advantage, but then the media avalanche decides otherwise. Junts is reflecting on whether it is more convenient to separate Carles Puigdemont’s return from the Spanish elections, but the press has decided it will be one of the elements of the electoral campaign. El País, which years ago had considered him little less than an ogre, now announces with great fanfare the Constitutional Court’s decision to send a double message: to Catalonia, that Sánchez delivers, and to the rest of the State, that de-escalating the independence tension is possible. On the other side of the Rubicon, however, his figure is used to further stir up the hornet's nest. “Puigdemont celebrates his victory and the defeat of the public powers”, they write in La Razón. But, if we look at the original statement by the Junts leader that justifies this headline, we see that a key word is missing. Puigdemont spoke of “the strategy of the Spanish public powers”. It is not the powers that have been defeated, but their strategy, which means their perversion, because they are supposed to function without political parties putting their paws into them. And this includes public powers like the police and the judges, but also private ones like the Ibex-35 or, cough, cough, the media. This idea of the “defeat of the Spanish powers” also appears in the headline of Abc, in this case with a quote that once again skips the key word.

We can rent an apartment, send an email, check a map, or listen to a podcast in Catalan with coverage close to 100%, because the most used tools in these cases already have an interface in our language. On the other hand, we cannot look for a job on LinkedIn, use Netflix in Catalan, learn languages from Catalan on Duolingo, or edit a video with CapCut: in these four use cases, the coverage is 0%.

The Movistar+ platform has premiered Believe me (Black Cab), a four-episode series that takes us back to the multiple rapes that occurred in London between 2000 and 2008. More than a hundred women who took one of the city's iconic black cabs were drugged and raped by their driver, John Worboys. For years, that taxi driver was able to act with absolute impunity because the police looked down on the complainants and judged them for their state of unconsciousness or for having been out partying. They also failed to properly file the reports, and this meant that the evidence and the victims' accounts were lost in the databases without being able to trace the culprit or detect a pattern of criminal behavior. It is inevitable that this series reminds us of another very similar one that Netflix released in 2019. Unbelievable (Unbelievable) dramatized a very similar true story that happened in the United States. The series showed how a police investigation can aggravate the trauma of rape victims, subjecting them to suspicion and blaming them. That production explained how two police detectives took on the cases with the necessary rigor, establishing essential protocols. They demonstrated how respect for the victims was essential to find the culprits.

The front pages the day after the election announcement show that this will be a high-sounding campaign, of communicative maximums. “A high-tension 29-N”, headlines El País, and it would be naive not to realize that the newspaper is also playing the same fear card that the cave has been placing on the table again and again for eight years. Meanwhile, the right-wing bench debates whether to consider Sánchez a corpse or a killer. They don't say it in those words, of course, but the subtext, like cotton, does not deceive. And when El Mundo writes, headlining its front page “Last move to survive”, it is evident that it is selling the bear's skin – in this case the dog's, that is, the dog– and that it offers its readers the dream of seeing the annihilation (metaphorical, for the moment) of its public enemy number one. Continuing with the animal semantic field, Sánchez would be the sea bass out of water that shakes pathetically with some final vain gasps. On the other hand, at La Razón they still do not consider him written off and headline “The Moncloa plan: judicial stoppage and campaign of coups”. According to their vision, and so as not to abandon the bestiary, we must see the PSOE leader as a donkey that pathetically kicks out before the frustration of seeing that they make him go down a path he does not want. It is a front page that delves into the idea of a leader who refuses to succumb to alternation and who, in this resistance, is capable of attacking institutional pillars such as the judicial establishment. About the independence of the judges, of course, better to talk about it another day.

After Pedro Sánchez's call for elections, Spanish television stations have increased the level of political tension. Even Ana Rosa Quintana, who has been demanding the end of the legislature for years, seemed angry when the moment finally arrived. She has been indignant at any decision by Sánchez for so many months that on the day her wishes came true, she did not know how to change her mood. How difficult it is to stop the informative hamster wheel when you have been pushing it by inertia for so many years.